7
SOLUTION SELLING
Solution selling has a traditional definition in which you satisfy customers by providing some combination of products and services that eliminates problems for them. We want to expand that definition, however, and include B2B selling, commonly known as insight selling—that is, you help customers think differently about their situation. In a sense, the “solution” you sell may be recasting what they saw as a problem, or operationally going in a different direction so the problem they had no longer exists.
Despite what some business analysts have asserted, solution selling is not going to disappear tomorrow and be replaced by its anticipatory cousin. Particularly if you’re in vertical market sales offering specialized products and services to an industry or profession, you will find yourself doing solution sales. You will also find yourself doing expertise selling (the subject of Chapter 8).
As for insight sales, this is not a new concept. A decades-old example of how a vendor anticipated a new use for its products and services came from conversations between an Apple sales team composed of a sales professional and an engineer and U.S. Army physicians at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC.1
The physicians were already using Apple technology at the hospital in 1992 when a U.S.—led multinational task force tried to address the humanitarian disaster that had developed in Somalia. The task force’s five-month effort attempted to restore order so that relief operations for Somali people could be conducted safely; it was known as Operation Restore Hope.
The traditional approach to battlefield medicine was to deploy medical teams. Technology would have been part of a solution for record-keeping, photo documentation of wounds and conditions, and communications. What the Walter Reed physicians dreamed up in conjunction with the Apple team was taking this one step further. They created a proactive use for Apple’s portable computing, imaging, and communications technologies. In the evacuation hospital in Somalia, the technology supported diagnostics and treatment as well as record-keeping. It was a pioneering, portable telemedicine system. If the problem the Army faced at the outset was putting an abundance of medical professionals in harm’s way, the solution involved rethinking the problem—to find a way to not send as many. Instead of deploying more people, they deployed gadgets that could record and transmit medical information back to Walter Reed, where specialists would evaluate it and advise the doctors on site. By getting the eyes of specialists 7,900 miles away at Walter Reed on critical cases in Somalia, the system prevented amputations, cured infections, guided life-saving surgery, and saved an immense amount of money on evacuations. A new era in military medicine had dawned.
The Mechanics of Finding the Solution
Regardless of whether you are trying to align a product-service combination with a defined, existing need or to shake up the way your customer perceives what you have to offer, you have to do three things in addition to your research:
1. Identify who the best person is to serve as your advocate in the organization.
2. Ask good questions.
3. Build a great deal of trust.
Identify an Advocate
Your ideal advocate might be very different depending on whether you are trying to match your products and services to a current need or anticipate—and even shape—a change in operational needs.
In one case, your advocate is someone who can navigate budgets and procedures to drive the sale forward. You would probably identify this person through research into the company’s organizational structure, his title, and his ability to describe and document the company’s need for a product and service like yours. You would also look for expertise: A person in that pivotal role would probably need subject-specific knowledge in order to choose a vendor well.
In the other case, your advocate is a change agent within the company. It could be the same person, depending on the size and organizational structure of the company, but it’s more likely they are different people.
Let’s look at what to look for in identifying a change agent for a moment, because that person often has unique personal characteristics that outweigh subject-matter expertise. Think of this person as the arrow up-front with all other people around her as arrows that pay attention to the direction she’s going. She walks into a room and on many levels you see what the following depicts—that is, an influencer who gets everyone to line up with her:
The body language of the people around her may tell you even more than her body language. Deference comes across in various ways, even among the most confident members of the team. They mirror her. They give her space. They listen attentively to her. If they disagree, they will more likely disagree on a detail than a principle.
Regardless of whether your target advocate is managing a defined project and looking for a solution, or a customer who is a change agent amenable to revising company approaches to challenges, you are better off if you see the arrows line up.
Here’s the gigantic challenge for you if you are a research and numbers person who has a hard time focusing on the human arrows lining up: You will make assumptions about who ought to be in charge, who ought to know what’s going on in the company now, and who ought to have the inside scoop on company directions. Instead, it will serve you well to pay attention to the people who command response and change.
The “arrow” in front—the one others line up behind—has differentiated herself from others. This is an important distinction that Gregory Hartley made in several of the human behavior books he did with Maryann, most notably Get People to Do What You Want.
Some people are differentiated because they are odd in some way. In that circumstance, it’s the people around them who set them apart; they don’t do it by choice. Other people consciously differentiate themselves from the crowd and thereby command attention. Some people are skilled at using that attention to get their opinions and ideas noticed. They can be change agents.
We did some consulting with one organization in which a relatively low-ranking staff member in a 55-person office was differentiated enough to be a significant influencer. She had been with this group for 10 years and had no ambition to be promoted. Nonetheless, she enjoyed being able to pronounce something “good” or “bad” and have people in the office, right up to the president, take her seriously. When the company’s database needs grew exponentially, she was asked to be on the committee to recommend a new system. Donna wasn’t the director of communications or technical support manager; she was the administrative assistant to the human resources director. When the committee was completing its review of options, Donna advocated for one vendor over another. Her conclusion: They see where we’re going, rather than being focused on where we’ve been. Her advocacy paid off for the vendor.
Donna was one of those people who could comfortably step in to become the arrow up-front. You might wonder why she never sought a promotion to officially have more power. Her love was music. She spent her personal time singing in choral group and doing regional musical theater productions. In her opinion, she didn’t have time to be a boss—but that didn’t mean she wanted to be powerless.
We want to venture beyond the basic categories of “good” questions, as defined and discussed in earlier chapters. It’s time to explore good questions that relate specifically to discovery. You want to ask questions that help you probe for information that stimulates creative thinking and problem solving.
Jamie McKenzie, EdD, is a consultant on inquiry-based teaching methods and founder of From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal.2 To help teachers in the classroom, he sorted discovery questions into 10 categories. Here we’ve used those categories as a springboard for boosting the value of the questions you ask a prospect or customer:
1. Understand.
2. Figure out.
3. Decide.
4. Build or invent.
5. Persuade or convince.
6. Challenge or destroy.
7. Acquaint.
8. Dismiss.
9. Wonder.
10. Predict.
Understand
Questions that promote understanding help make the facts relevant and related. Instead of getting bits and pieces of the information you need from a series of direct questions, they invite the person to make sense of those facts.
A standard set of direct questions about your customer’s real estate requirements might be:
How long have you been in your current facility?
What do you dislike about it?
How many people do you expect to accommodate in five years?
What are the primary uses for the space?
In contrast, a question aimed at understanding might take this shape:
Let’s look at top challenges you have with your current space. What are they and why are they important?
Figure Out
Questioning with the aim of helping customers delve into the guts of a problem means asking questions that require thinking, not simply remembering.
A question only requiring recall would be:
What notable thing has your competition done in this area?
It’s not a bad question, but it doesn’t stimulate insights about the competitive climate, relevant actions that competing company might have taken to gear up for what it did, and how the notable thing relates to your customer’s next steps.
Making the question more of a “why” and not a “what,” however, can generate a more useful and provocative answer:
Why did your competitor exceed revenue projections by an estimated 30 percent last year?
Decide
This type of question helps spotlight options that affect the choice of a course of action.
A question that fails to do this just asks for basic facts:
What is your current ROI on this program and how does that compare to last year?
You’ve already done your homework on the company, so that’s probably what we would call a control question anyway: You know the answer; you just want to get it from the source. Instead, use the answer you already know as a starting point:
How would you have done things differently to improve the ROI on that program this year?
Build or Invent
This is a question to engage critical thinking.
The ineffective question about your prospect’s public relations program would be:
What’s your current situation with media coverage?
Now consider how much you learn about your customer’s perspective, priorities, and subject matter knowledge by asking this instead:
Assume you’ve been asked by Fast Company to do an article on how startups can get better media coverage. What would you put in it?
Asking a question like the one in this example clearly requires some level of rapport with the person. Some people who’ve just met you have a creative nature and would respond extremely well to a question that required so much mental adrenaline. But if you aren’t sure this is an approach that would work with the person, just save this kind of question for later in the meeting.
Persuade or Convince
The focus in this category of question is asking your customer to identify prime arguments of a thesis. If the topic, therefore, is sales performance, then the information you seek is what in the mind of the customer constitutes good (or bad) sales performance.
The weak question would be:
Who are the top sales people in your organization?
Questions that get more to the heart of the matter are:
What sets apart your top performers?
How did those traits contribute to your top performers’ bottom line?
Challenge or Destroy
The question points to a shortcoming in a plan or an assertion, and the point is for the customer to ponder, “What really happened here? Why is that so?”
The question that doesn’t quite take the person into that thoughtful state is:
What led up to the significant drop in sales in the second quarter?
An improvement on that would be:
What issues related to supply chain and manufacturing led up to the significant drop in sales in the second quarter?
Acquaint
We have often stressed the value of all the interrogatives—who, what, when, where, why, and how—in beginning good questions requiring narrative responses. In an acquaint question, however, who, what, when, and where are not particularly useful. How or why questions more easily take you where you want to go. You are trying to draw the person into layers of information.
A flat question that wouldn’t necessarily elicit what you need is:
What went wrong with the project?
A different interrogative and a few specifics are all you need to improve on it:
How did the project fall short in terms of time line, budget, and quality?
Dismiss
Just don’t ask something that is not worth knowing or that you can—and should—know the answer to if you had done your homework.
For example, do not ask an executive with a web design facility in Bangladesh:
What is your policy on outsourcing?
Instead, try this:
What aspects of your outsourcing policy are working well? Not so well?
Wonder
In a build-or-invent question, you tried to engage your custom-er’s critical thinking, which may or may not involve a great deal of imagination. With wonder questions, you invite the person to indulge in “what if?” thinking. You want to encourage healthy speculation, to have her connect the dots and come up with different pictures. Here, literally, is what we mean by that:
The same configuration of dots delivers two very different images, just as the same data points in a conversation with your customer could yield different conclusions. There will be times when you need to discourage that, but with wonder questions, you want unrestrained imagination.
Keep in mind that it’s possible for “image” to make no sense once the dots are connected. That will often happen, but if you are vigorously examining innovative ways to create opportunities or solve a problem, wonder questions can be part of a valuable exercise.
A question that doesn’t quite get the juices flowing would be:
How do you see the solution taking shape?
If you want to move away from questions like that to which the customer could give a pat answer, try something like this:
What if you could wave a magic wand and make all those problems you described go away? What would happen first? What next?
Predict
These are decide questions, as described previously, with a twist: They look forward. So you take a question that helps spotlight options that affect the choice of a course of action and give it a futuristic spin.
The decide question we used previously that asked for basic facts is:
What is your current ROI on this program and how does that compare to last year?
The predict question would be:
How do you want to do things differently next year to improve the ROI on that program?
Build Trust
Central to moving forward as you explore your prospect’s needs is a shared sense of trust. On your end, you have confidence you are getting the information you require to design a solution for the client. On his end, he trusts that you are as competent and able to come through with the deliverables as you say you are.
Neuro-economist Paul Zak began more than a decade of research when he realized he could not answer this question: Why do two people trust each other in the first place?3 Previous research by multiple teams documented that people are naturally inclined to trust each other—but they don’t always. Zak speculated that there was a signal in the brain that alerted people that it was okay to trust another person.
This sounds like a magic bullet for selling, doesn’t it? All you have to do is find out what triggers a sense of trust and your relationship with a customer is solid. Interestingly enough, it really is that simple.
Zak found that activities and feelings that stimulate the release of the hormone oxytocin in the body create a predisposition to trust another person. This goes in reverse, too: If a sense of trust is present, then oxytocin production is stimulated.
Ideally, when you are working with your customer to design and implement a solution to his problem, both of you are doing purpose-driven work. Zak’s research documented that this kind of shared sense of purpose triggers the release of oxytocin. The follow-on is that the two of you grow to trust each other more, thus leading to an even better relationship.
Fixing Bad Solution Selling
Solution selling errors fall into two categories, either offering a product-service combination that does not solve the problem, or offering a solution that solves the problem but that they can’t afford or use.
A Solution That Isn’t
The logical reasons why you would try to match your product and service inappropriately are primarily that:
• You weren’t listening to the description of the problem.
• You made an assumption that what you have to offer will fix the problem.
• You don’t understand the problem.
• You don’t understand the features of your own product or service.
• The prospect doesn’t understand his problem.
• The prospect described his problem inaccurately.
• The prospect invited you to describe your product or service because he thought it was something that it isn’t.
Let’s look at an example of how a mix of these issues might play out.
A company hired Paul to upgrade its project management performance. The problem the hiring executive had identified was a sloppy approach to the “triple constraints” of project management—namely, cost, time, and scope. The product he wanted was proprietary software and the service he wanted was Paul’s expertise in helping companies avert issues with the triple constraints.
• Paul listened to a description of the problem, that is, the project management skills and performance of people in the company were substandard.
• No doubts entered Paul’s mind; he was fully capable and experienced to deliver a customized software package as well as to teach people how to make the best use of it.
• He understood the problem as it was presented to him. He just didn’t know what the real problem was until he had already been hired and came face-to-face with people in the organization.
• Paul understood exactly what he had to offer because they were the products of experience and expertise. He also knew that he was skilled at training people in project management.
• The prospect really didn’t understand his problem. He was a numbers guy and so he looked at shortfalls in income and overruns in spending, as well as issues with time management, and all he concluded was that he needed a technical solution to a technical set of problems.
• The prospect accurately described the manifestations of the problem, but not the problem itself.
• The prospect was very clear on what Paul offered; unfortunately, he wasn’t clear on what he needed.
When he got into the seminar portion of his deliverables, Paul was finally face-to-face with whole group. His interaction prior to that was limited to one-on-one or one-on-two conversations with a handful of senior people about needs, expectations, upcoming challenges, and so on. When the group came together for their training, their body language gave them away. It was easy to see who was confrontational, who felt threatened, who preferred limited contact with others in the room, who inspired cooperation, and who was obsessively analytical.
The problem was that the people who had to get things done together were not a team, so Paul’s solution couldn’t be a complete solution.
Part of a sales professional’s success in solution selling is the agility of the main point of contact as it relates to addressing the problem. Paul was dealing with someone who seemed to want the entire focus on software and training, whereas Paul could see that the team needed a different kind of help in addition to his technical skills: Solving the company’s project management shortfalls had to involve fixing relationship issues. It was not something he knew how to do, but he had seen the problem enough to be able to identify it.
Paul delivered the goods, but he also told his contact what he had observed. Much to his surprise, the executive expressed his appreciation. He said he would do whatever it would take to get his people to stop sabotaging productivity and accountability through their behavior.
In short, Paul hadn’t really sold him a complete solution, but he had ultimately thought one through. The customer was satisfied.
Consider that your customer has an industrial operation requiring a certain process for manufacturing. You come in with precisely the machine that will handle the job. The customer has made it clear to you in previous discussions that it has minimal open floor space. You have the needed solution, but you know the customer can’t utilize it without costly modifications to the manufacturing floor. You are offering a non-solution, even though it’s the perfect solution.
You describe it; it’s what the customer needs and wants. There is a lot of money at stake. You are not looking at a future with this customer; you are looking at closing a high-dollar sale with a commission that will pay your mortgage for a year.
You already know you are offering a solution the customer cannot use without incurring significant additional costs, so your body language will likely bleed deception. Compounding any suspicions you may have raised about your integrity or competence that relate to the product itself, your body language is now amplifying the doubts the customer has about you. You are telegraphing the truth: You don’t mind disregarding the customer’s actual needs in the interest of making a sale.
How much are you going to sweat? And if you don’t, how will this come back to haunt you?
Solution selling is about actual solutions. If you don’t have one, then say so. Or if you have the perfect solution, but it costs too much either directly or indirectly, then say so. Any dishonesty will corrupt your body language to point where an astute person will see you cannot be trusted. Unless you are a sociopath (that’s a different book).
Here’s how the solution sale could turn into a positive experience with the same customer:
• Acknowledge the drawback with what you have to offer and ask about expansion plans. Be honest: “This is what you need, but I realize you don’t have the room for it right now.”
• Let him know have considered his situation carefully and still want to help him address it. You might say, “Until you do that expansion, it may be possible to still have the solution. I’ve recently sold two of these in this area and I know that both companies have additional capacity. Would you like me to talk with those customers and see if they can sell you time on the equipment during their off-hours?”
The customer then thinks, “He’s offering a solution he’s not going to make any money on.” Then you are doing actual solution selling, and setting up a relationship that will yield opportunities for years to come. You are suddenly the go-to sales professional who taps into your customers’ needs and comes up with answers to their problems regardless of commission. You have set yourself up to make money down the road, and your reputation with your customers is sterling.
Summary Points
• Solution selling means potentially two things. First, it means satisfying customers by providing some combination of products and services that eliminates problems for them. Secondly, it means helping customers think differently about their situation. Your “solution” is recasting what they saw as a problem, or operationally going in a different direction so the problem they had disappears.
• To be effective at solution selling, you have to do three major things in addition to your research:
1. Identify who the best person is to serve as your advocate in the organization. Identify the influencer(s). Watch the body language of people around the one who seems to be the influencer to get your confirmation of the ID.
2. Ask good questions. Ask at least one of the 10 types of questions that best help you with discovery.
3. Build a great deal of trust. A key advantage in your type of selling is the nature of your work. You are partnering with your customer to design and implement a solution to his problem, so you are in sync on doing purpose-driven work. The mirroring and active listening you do to express collaboration are important.
• There can be relatively easy ways to fix the big problems related to solution selling. Go back to the customer with your honest observations. Go ahead and risk being creative. As long as you are focused on a real solution for your customer, your going out on a limb will likely be appreciated.